During the peak of its popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Sullivans programshowcased a wide range of entertainers, including Elvis read more, On September 28, 1918, a Liberty Loan parade in Philadelphia prompts a huge outbreak of Spanish flu in the city. On January 18, 1993, Rock Thriault was sentenced to life in prison. Average Age & Life Expectancy Robert R Boilard lived 30 years shorter than the average Boilard family member when he died at the age of 44. Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368 . Roch Theriault subjected his followers to horrific abuse - until one of them managed to escape. he said, fetching a carpet knife. Taking a dull meat cleaver, Thriault swung at the exposed bone. Even while he was in prison, three of his wives continued conjugal visits and two of the three bore him more children. -- Cult leader Roch Theriault, who once used a meat cleaver to amputate the arm of a concubine, was denied parole yesterday on the grounds he represents an ongoing danger to society. Although he was having sexual congress with her on a regular basis, to keep up appearances he made a bed in the back of his truck, so that it would appear that his scruples forbade him from sleeping with a woman to whom he was not married. Cowed and afraid for her life, Gisle agreed to return to the compound. The lowest of them all was Maryse Grenier; Thriault forbade Jacques and Maryse from sleeping together, and encouraged Jacques to beat her if she talked back to him or to Rock even though she was pregnant. He himself became "Mose," or Moses, leader of the exodus from the depraved modern world. [1] Thriault made another member, Gabrielle Lavalle, stitch her up using needle and thread, and had the other women shove a tube down her throat and blow through it. Thriault claimed to be a holy being, and started performing unnecessary amateur surgical operations on sick members to demonstrate his healing powers. Theriault gave her his special brand of medical treatment. The children had chores around the commune such as hand-washing the adult women's sanitary napkins. Theriault, the leader of the most bizarre and violent cult in Canadian history, often physically abused his followers. In their new environments, however, they exhibited disturbing behaviour which indicated that they had been abused on the compound. Roch Theriault, 63, was involved in an altercation early Saturday morning, according to police. "[16], The 2002 film Savage Messiah depicts Thriault's crimes against his followers and the ensuing legal recourse. He was stabbed in the neck with a shiv and afterwards MacDonald walked up to prison guards and told them: That piece of s*** is down on the range. This made her feel worse. When the child then died, Theriault castrated the man as punishment. For some, this was all too much. This memorial website was created in memory of Robert R Boilard, 44, born on August 26, 1958 and passed away on February 24, 2003. View our online Press Pack. This was all built by his two male and nine female followers four of whom were pregnant, and all of whom were also responsible for the commune's ten children, ranging in age from one to fifteen. In 2002, Thriault was rejected for parole as he was considered too high a risk to re-offend, and he never applied again. They erected a tent-town, spent a week retrieving tools from the cars, and then began construction on a large communal cabin. In February 1979, when the apocalypse did not occur, people started questioning Thriault's wisdom, but he defended himself saying that time on Earth and in God's world were not parallel, and that therefore it was a miscalculation. On January 26, 1985, somewhere shortly after 9:00am, Gabrielle put her five-month-old baby, Rock's son Eleazar, in a wheelbarrow. When she died the next day in agonizing pain, he sawed off the top of her head, and then sexually assaulted her. After that, Gigure became "Mose's" main enforcer. In the following months Theriault's delusions grew and he became convinced the world would end in 1979. Jacques Gigure and Maryse Grenier did likewise, and "Marise" and Jose Pelletier rejoined the group. The young members of the Ant Hill Kids were routinely sexually abused, nailed to trees so other children could hurl stones at them and held over fires. Along with Clifford Olsen and Paul Bernardo, Thriault is considered one of Canada's most notorious criminals. old-school old testament messiah. For other inquiries, Contact Us. Francine, Chantal, and Nicole Hogla, Ruth, and Debora respectively remain loyal to Rock. All of these people, plus Roch, began hanging around at Gisle's apartment. Between the five of them, they had lifted $453.37 in goods. With this, the systematic sex abuse of his female followers also became more profound but in addition to this, he began to exert control in ever increasingly sinister and violent ways. These are more like giant, professionally produced graphic novels. As far as Rock was concerned, if the rest of the world wouldn't voluntarily give them what they needed, they would have to take it. Her body was found in 1989 at the cult's camp near Lindsay, Ont., 70 kilometres northeast of Toronto. "use strict";(function(){var insertion=document.getElementById("citation-access-date");var date=new Date().toLocaleDateString(undefined,{month:"long",day:"numeric",year:"numeric"});insertion.parentElement.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(date),insertion)})(); FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. We are now looking for artists, writers and interviewers to take part in the world famous Serial Killer Magazine. He soon proved to excel at this. The vast majority of the cult's followers abandoned Thriault after his arrest, but during his imprisonment he fathered another four children with remaining female members during conjugal visits. She was born in Arthabaska, Quebec, Canada, on Jan. 27, 1943, the daughter of the late Armand and Rachel (Gardner) Chainey. A week later he agreed, and they were married on January 8, 1978, at an Adventist church in Montral. And the police investigation into the brutal practises inside the Ant Hill Kids cult didn't end there. Jacques Fiset left; Thriault told the others he had been taken by the Devil. Allegedly, baby Samuel's head was flopping around on his neck, and his penis had swelled up. He started pressing and punching Solange's stomach; when she put her hands up to fend him off, Rock simply told her to move her hands, and she did. But after Gabrielle escaped for a third and final time the police caught up with Theriault and he was he was jailed for chopping off her arm and sentenced to 12 years in jail. On the other hand, Thriault felt that now Veer was a security risk, and enjoyed tormenting him, beating him, and playing games in which he would instruct his followers to pierce Veer through the chest with knives and bleed him to death only to call them off, like God called off Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, at the very last minute. Theriault believed the world was going to end in 1979 and that he alone was a saviour to protect mankind from evil. Greg Lupson. Retrieved March 2013, from, Dimmock, G. (2011, November 14). He would also play the wives off against each other, manipulating their self-esteem to his whim. Wearing red velour robes and a gold-colored crown-the symbols of his proclaimed role as "King of the Israelites"Thriault punched Boilard in the stomach, jammed a plastic tube up her rectum . His death is believed to be the result of an altercation with his cellmate, Matthew Gerrard MacDonald, a 60-year-old convicted murderer from Port au Port, Newfoundland and Labrador, who was charged with the killing. (cult leader Roch Theriault) (includes related article) (Cover Story) | HighBeam Business: Arrive Prepared", "Cult killer's prison art for sale on U.S. website", "Prison officials move to block sale of murderer's artwork", "Officials bring down gavel on murderer's art auction", "Inmate suspected in cult leader's death: RCMP", "Fellow inmate charged in cult leader's death", "Life sentence for murder of cult leader Roch Thriault", "Savage Messiah - European Premiere Screening", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roch_Thriault&oldid=1139764187, This page was last edited on 16 February 2023, at 19:59. "That night, July 26, 1989, he hacked off my right arm, not only my hand, he took off part of my right arm.". Theriault was 63-years-old and his doomsday cult was finally over. During his reign, Thriault mutilated several members. Thriault had Veer lie on the kitchen table as Gabrielle fetched the medical instruments: an elastic band, a razor blade, a magnifying glass, a pair of tweezers, and the ethanol. His third murder was one his concubines, Solange Boilard, who complained of an upset stomach. All the child's mother had wanted to do was to keep her baby away from Theriault's reach. Thriault wanted to bury her at the foot of the "Eternal Mountain," but she was taken by the authorities for an autopsy. Thriault next claimed that he had the ability of resurrection. Members were not allowed to speak to each other when he was not present, nor were they allowed to have sex with each other without his permission. They found the child's remains, and the commune members told the story of Veer beating the child. This desire was readily satisfied by his physical presence and by his penchant for showmanship. But amazingly, he escaped justice and his vile reign of abuse stepped up a gear. They worked at least seventeen hours a day clearing the land, and occasionally getting supplies from the village. Hyacinthe, a labourer, was devoutly religious and a member of the Union des Electeurs (Union of Electors, also known as Berets blancs or "White Berets" on account of their signature mission uniform), a Catholic fascist offshoot of the Depression-era Crditiste movement. Roch (now calling himself "Rock," the anglicization of his French name) commissioned an A-frame cabin, a two-storey house with a kitchen, a bakery, a maple sugar shack, a smokehouse, a root cellar, and a stone "sanctuary" or altar upon which he would commune with God. They were forbidden to go to the hospital. We pay for your stories! Solange Boilard's body was exhumed and properly laid to rest. Roch Thriault (pronounced "Rosh Terry-o") was born in the Saguenay Valley of Qubec on May 16, 1947, to Hyacinthe and Pierrette Thriault, the second of seven children and the eldest boy. She said that the women who had not been married were lonely. And doomsday cult leader Roch Theriault wanted to ensure his believers a place in heaven following what he believed was the imminent end of the world. In 1993, Thriault pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the death of Solange Boilard, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. One month later, only four days after Qubec City's Le Soleil published a story on the group entitled "They Are Happy And Free To Leave If They Wish" (which referred to Thriault as the group's "spiritual father," and which included quotes from an interview with fled member Jacques Fiset, in which he stated that the group was democratically run), ten police officers set a helicopter down on the Eternal Mountain. The whole thing seemed to be over. [1] Thriault's followers, including 12 adults and 22 children, lived under his totalitarian rule at the commune and were subject to severe physical and sexual abuse. In 1880 there were 8 Boilard families living in Illinois. If the parents refused, it would only reinforce what he had always said about them; if they agreed, the group would have money to continue its way of living in isolation. If you're sensitive to graphic accounts of gross domestic violence, don't read this. They said that talking publicly about their father frees them from the horrors they lived through. Roch was given little to complain about as a child, passing a relatively uneventful adolescence in Thetford Mines; but as he grew older, he discovered that complaining about his childhood was a great way to get sympathy.